Though Beloved, Italian Struggles to Survive in City Schools

The Italian government paid $300,000 to start the program and Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi flew to New York for the September 2003 launch. An additional $200,000 from Italian cultural groups flowed in. Some 1,600 students took the first test in 2006, a number that increased to nearly 2,300 students in 2009, but still well short of the College Board’s target of 5,000 a year. In the four years AP Italian was offered, it incurred losses of $1.5 million a year.

Italian is the language of Leonardo Da Vinci, Dante and Giacomo Puccini. But as culturally embedded as aspects of Italy are in American culture – “The Sopranos”, Madonna, Lady Gaga, Nancy Pelosi – the language just isn’t spoken that widely in the U.S. (There are even rumors that Frank Sinatra didn’t speak Italian fluently.)

Today, about 17.8 million people of Italian-American ancestry live in the U.S., according to the U.S. Census. About 684,000 of them in New York City, making up 8.2% of the city’s population. However, many of them are third- or fourth-generation, meaning that Italian might not be spoken at home. A lot of Italian, and many other languages and dialects spoken by immigrants, died off as Italians assimilated in the U.S. during Ellis Island’s peak years. Only a million or so Italian-Americans who say they speak a language other than English at home today, with the largest share of them in New York state, according to the Census.

“That was the time of the melting pot,” Marty Abbott, director of education at the American Council on Teaching of Foreign Languages said. “They melted in and we lost the language.”

Abbott says her group looked at everything from “The Sopranos” to Renaissance art to try and understand the gap between the desire to learn the language and logistic difficulties in expanding Italian programs nationwide, especially before students hit the college level.

Marketability may be a factor – unlike Spanish and Mandarin, Italian isn’t seen as giving students an edge in their future careers. “There’s a love affair with Italy,” Abbott says. “But many still view it as a leisure language.”

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